A couple of miscellaneous links first :

Green Plastic Radiohead and French hardcore fans Aurélien & Mona present Kid A seconds by seconds : a track by track minute description of each song from the forthcoming and long-awaited Rahiohead fourth album.

<FRENCH>La version française originale du même document. Tant que vous y êtes, faites un tour sur leur excellent site.</FRENCH>

Hundreds of wonderfull bjork wallpapers here.

It’s important to support your local bands from times to times. My problem is that I could hardly introduce a cool new French indie band. Where’s the French indie scene ? Miossec ? Noir Désir ? huum. Placebo is only 1/3 from Luxemburg, dEUS 4/5 belgian, Soulwax 100% Flemish, Venus from Brussels… None of them is French. There’s no way out of house & hip-hop music here.

It seems to me that the French equivalent of indie bands are Ska/Reggae/Punk bands. I mean : hip college girls and boys listen to those bands, and they have a true originality. My best friends (Vioud, that’s you !) know Sergent Garcia, Spook & the Guay, Les Papaz, Rasta Bigoud, Ludwig von 88 and the likes much better than Pavement, Guided by Voices, the Dismemberment Plan, Zita Swoon or even the Best Band of The World (c)(tm) : dEUS…

So, after three weeks of intense Tori Amos infatuation (« To Venus & Back » is the second CD I have burnt to Nita, the first one being.. guess it… dEUS’ Ideal Crash), until she (Tori) made her way to my 1999 top-ten, after these three weeks, I’m currently driving myself to an auditive O.D. of the Ruda Salska second album : L’Art de la Joie. Very good music, that avoids two main drawbacks of bad ska/punk bands : a) the songs don’t seem like they’re all the same : the melody and the beats change thorough the LP (for the best!); b) the lyrics are very clever, and never reduce to a boring « fuck the police / fuck the fascism » everyone agrees about. So, being French or not, you should give it a serious try, since this band manages to make very good songs without taking itself seriously, with the fun of life as the only motivation.

PS: un très bon site français sur Tori Amos.